Words: Brad Sterling

The great diversity of surf craft we enjoy today is the result of the evolutionary leaps of an eclectic cast of great surfboard innovators

You wouldn’t think evolutionary theory and surfboard design have a lot in common, but the concept of “radiation” could be applied to both. In evolutionary terms Radiation means a sudden increase in taxonomic diversity caused by elevated rates of speciation. As impressive as this sounds, it’s really just a fancy way of saying that the Earth’s fossil records seem to suggest that the same species roam the earth (and the seas) for extended periods of time without much noticeable change and then something, largely unexplained, happens and suddenly there are a whole bunch of new species running (and swimming) around. It seems that, without these events, evolution just wouldn’t happen. The same could be said of surfboards.

 Surfboards have been through numerous evolutionary leaps since westerners first got their hands on the ancient Hawaiian wave sliders somewhere around the turn of the 20th century.  There have been far too many players in this gradual process of experimentation and refinement to list by name, but there are some key individuals whose contribution to the development of surfboard design have had a seismic effect that has reverberated across oceans and eras.

 1.    The Man Who Walks on Water

 George Douglas Freeth Jr. was a haole (local slang for a white person) born in Honolulu in 1883. The son of an Irish sea captain and a part-Hawaiian mother from a well-to-do family, George experimented with surfboard design, cutting his traditional 16-foot Alaia surfboard in half, a move that led to the development of the plank style of surfboard. Although still straight and flat, the plank was a shorter, lighter and more manoeuvrable surfboard that would dominate popular surfboard design until the 1930s. Freeth was hired by American railroad magnate Henry Edward Huntington to put on surfing displays to sell the beach lifestyle of the newly re-named Huntington Beach, in Southern California. Freeth was billed as “the man who walks on water”. It’s no coincidence that Huntington has been known as mainland USA’s Surf City ever since, enshrined in pop music and movies, despite its generally lacklustre surf.

2.    The Hollywood Stuntman

 Thomas Edward Blake was born in the Great Lakes region of the US in 1902, miles from the nearest ocean. A chance meeting with Duke Kahanamoku at a Detroit movie theatre in 1920 lead him to the Hawaiian Islands. An avid paddleboard racer, Tom’s great contributions to surfboard design occurred in several stages, starting with the cigar box design whereby he took a solid wooden board, drilled several holes in it to reduce its weight, then covered the top and bottom with a thin plywood skin. The second phase saw Blake bisecting his boards and carving out the interior before gluing them back together (a model that became known as the chambered hollow). Finally, Blake settled on a design that used wooden ribs to support a thin wooden veneer. Inspired by the design of aeroplane wings (and utilising boat building techniques), the skin-on-frame design reduced the weight of the now old-fashioned plank surfboards by almost half. It also enabled Blake to dominate paddle racing in California and Hawaii for years to come. Finally, he added a skeg (or fin) from a small speedboat on the underside near the tail. This gave surfers greater control and, quite literally, changed the course of surfing.

3.    A Hawk, A Pig, And The First Surf Shop

 Named after the Californian point for which they were designed, the lightweight Malibu style of surfboard was made from solid balsa wood. Over time, these were phased out for a design that used a balsa core (or blank) covered with fibreglass. While there were several key players involved in the development of the Malibu, Dale Velzy is considered a pivotal figure in its evolution as it was his Pig model that would serve as the prototype for the Malibu designs that followed. After serving in World War II, Velzy returned home to southern California where he set up a surfboard repair and construction operation under the Manhattan Beach pier. He quickly outgrew his home-base though and in 1950 he borrowed money to rent a former shoe repair shop nearby and established what is widely regarded as the world’s first commercial surf shop. Known as the Hawk for his keen eye, Velzy partnered with Hap Jacobs in 1953 to open a new and larger shop in Venice Beach and in 1955 the duo created the narrow-nosed Pig design which revolutionised surfing by allowing for sharper turns and cut-backs. 

4.    The Foamy Visionary 

In 1955 Gordon Grubby  Clark, a laminator for Hobie Surfboards , began to experiment with polyurethane foam in his search for a lightweight alternative to balsa, strengthened by a wooden strip called a stringer which was introduced in 1958. In 1961, Clark left Hobie and founded Clark Foam, a company that would become the world’s leading provider of surfboard blanks for decades to come. The use of foam blanks covered with fibreglass would become the dominant method for constructing surfboards that persists to this day, and allow for greater refinements and subtleties in surfboard design. 

 5.    The Children of the Revolution

In 1965 Australian Bob McTavish witnessed American kneeboarder George Greenough surfing at Maroochydore. McTavish was impressed by Greenough’s ability to turn the kneeboard and generate speed from the tail of his lightweight, low volume, “spoon” kneeboard. This gave McTavish the idea to start making surfboards shorter, leading to what became known as the Shortboard Revolution, with McTavish and Hawaiian shaper Dick Brewer leading the charge, with significant supporting roles from Midget Farrelly and Peter Drouyn.  The Revolution gathered pace in 1967 as boards shrank from over 10 feet to less than eight feet. These shorter boards enabled surfers to carve their boards in the pocket of the wave, turn sharply and ride in the curling part of the wave (the tube), in what McTavish dubbed the “involvement school”. Surfing was changed forever. It is no accident that this coincided with the so-called “Summer of Love,” as drugs and music fueled a radical social movement, just as surfing was becoming more radical on the back of much shorter surfboards and new attitudes.

6.    Twinning and Thrusting

 American Bob Simmons had been experimenting with double-finned surfboards since the mid-1940s but it wasn’t until Australian Mark Richards designed his signature twin fin shortboard and began to dominate professional surfing on it in the late 1970s that twinnies  became popular. But even then, they were generally viewed as a great performance board for small waves and the single fin was still by far the most popular surfboard choice.

But in April 1981 a giant swell arrived for the annual Bells Beach Easter Classic  and Australian Simon Anderson paddled out in the massive surf on his tri-fin Thruster design, a board which he initially thought was going to help him surf better in small waves. He rode the thruster to an impressive victory on the giant Bells Beach walls and, in so doing, shifted the surfboard design paradigm for decades to come. To this day the thruster is by far the most popular and widely chosen surfboard fin setup around the globe.

Today

 The thruster enjoyed a steep rise in popularity from 1981 onward and remained largely unchallenged until the modern era. In 2021 however, the variety of craft one is likely to spot in the lineup on any given today is at an all-time high. Today it is not uncommon, at beaches all over the world, to see shortboards, longboards, fish, fibreglass, epoxy, balsa boards, softboards, thrusters, twin-fins and quad fin set-ups. We are spoiled for choice and opportunity and the developments that lead to each of these choices could be equally regarded as pivotal moments (or Radiation Events) in the evolution of surfboard design.

Brad Sterling is a WA-based journalist and surfer and the creator of the West Peak Sessions podcast. Give it a listen here.

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